How the racist, homophobic, violent, Far-Right Christian evangelizing culture of G4S
may have led Mateen to act as he did.
excerpts from article:
Mateen’s ideological evolution takes us well beyond the banal idea that this was "just another" IS-inspired atrocity.
before his G4S stint, Mateen was not a homophobe.
Ten years ago, according to a former high school friend Samuel King, Mateen “didn’t have an issue with the LGBT community”.
According to Mateen’s ex-wife, Sitora Yusufiy, Mateen became increasingly abusive after they were married in April 2009 – two years after he joined G4S: “He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”
The problem is that G4S’s approach to domestic security in the US homeland amounts to a hotbed of routine abuse, sexual violence, extremism and homophobia, tolerated at the highest levels of G4S’s management.
Last October, four G4S security officers filed a religious discrimination lawsuit against the Florida-based firm for firing them when they complained about the extremist, homophobic bigotry of their senior G4S supervisor.
The lawsuit, which demands $3.5 million in damages, says that a G4S kiosk where the guards worked at a shopping centre was managed by “a devoutly Christian supervisor who told employees their gay family members were going to hell, played videos about the Illuminati and warned that the security kiosk could be attacked by demons,” according to a local Portland publication.
The supervisor would post Bible verses on the walls and hold daily "prayer circles" with two other guards as part of a campaign of “fervent evangelising”, according to the court filings.
The FBI had already interviewed Mateen in 2013 and 2014, and even placed him temporarily on a terror watch list, after he had told co-workers about his sympathies with militant or terrorist groups that the agency has not identified publicly.
So around this period, Mateen had suddenly begun to display an increased interest in a belligerent Islamist extremist ideology. By the time he met Gilroy, he had begun praying regularly, bringing his prayer mat to work. But even Gilroy observed that Mateen’s ritualistic religiosity was completely at odds with his behaviour – he would frequently rail against black people, display sexual interest in random women, and openly talk about wanting to kill people.
G4S has not yet provided any clarity as to why it failed to act on these repeated complaints which, at the very least, should have entailed an internal investigation into Mateen’s professional conduct.
It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion, though, that G4S superiors simply did not see Mateen’s sociopathic tendencies as a problem. In much the same way that G4S management decided to protect an extremist Christian homophobic supervisor in Portland, they preferred not to reign in Mateen’s openly homicidal extremism.
G4S’s routine protection of violent, racist tendencies among its security officers appears to be an institutionalised global problem for the government contractor.
Over the last decade, the firm has been beset by scandal after scandal due to allegations and findings of systematic tolerance of astonishing abuse.
Indeed, according to a report by the American Friends Services Committee: “In Florida there have been consistent reports of sexual abuse, use of excessive force, recurring riots, and numerous resulting lawsuits against the company.”
In Malawi, Mozambique and South Africa, among other countries where G4S has security contracts, official complaints under OECD guidelines documented disturbing “testimonies of racial segregation and poverty wages” discriminating against black workers under the company's management.
G4S employees in Britain have been found to routinely engage in racist, misogynist and homophobic banter, and the firm’s child services systematically subjected children to physical abuse often resulting in “life-threatening harm”.
Despite repeatedly voicing to his G4S colleagues his desire to kill people, his sympathy for terrorists, along with racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic views, G4S superiors opted to keep Mateen armed, dangerous and on the payroll.
http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/how-g4s-incubated-homophobic-hatred-orlando-s-isis-terrorist-451507222
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